The 89e season of the Orchester symphonique de Montréal ended as it began, with Mahler. After leading the huge second symphony in September, Rafael Payare put a remarkable end to his first year as musical director with the no less monumental Third symphony of the Bohemian composer.
Conducting Mahler is obviously a challenge in terms of orchestral set-up, with a hundred musicians on stage and an arm’s length score. But the music director of the OSM goes well, well beyond the small “kitchen”. He makes Symphony noh 3 in D minor a vast tableau in which hundreds of characters move. We think of these film-worlds as Intolerance of Griffith or War and peace of Bondarchuk.
This is particularly the case in the first movement, not far from being the longest symphonic movement in the entire repertoire. One could reproach Mahler for having inserted too many secondary characters, for having fallen into a certain puffiness.
But Payare breathes such life into all of this that we gladly follow him through the many maze of Mahler.
We are gripped as soon as the horns come in, maybe too much legato (Mahler puts accents on each note), but very “powerful, determined”, as the composer asks. The bass drum pianissimo by Serge Desgagnés then installs, in all subtlety, the atmosphere of suspense that was to follow. Song and sense of narration: Rafael Payare’s OSM had already, in a few bars, announced its colors for the next 90 minutes.
The second and third movements are perhaps lighter (the previous one is supposed to evoke telluric forces whereas these respectively represent plants and animals), but they follow somewhat the same recipe: succession of many themes and motifs often strongly contrasting.
The conductor once again brings all these characters to life, giving them the floor in turn with authority and sensitivity.
Entering at the beginning of the second movement, the voices would then have their moment. American mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, who recorded Mahler with Boulez, Haitink and company, was overwhelming in the fourth movement, the “O Mensch! Gib acht! (O man, beware!), taken fromThus spake Zarathustra of Nietzsche. The vibrato has gotten quite wide over time, but that’s hardly a problem in this post-Wagnerian aesthetic.
The two choirs, the women of the OSM Choir and the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, installed on the balconies, were impeccable in the fifth movement, taken from the collection of the Wonderful child’s horn.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Rafael Payare and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
But it is probably in the last movement, linked as it should be without interruption, that the emotion reached its zenith. For Mahler, it is here that “everything is resolved in peace and in Being”, as he wrote to a relative. Payare understood this well, he who directs the beginning of this adagio in a kind of blissful resignation, letting the music unfold naturally until the vibrant climax where you had to have a heart of stone not to feel the hairs on your arms stand up. of contentment.
How not to wait impatiently for the Symphonies No. 1 And 7 by the same composer next year?
At the start of the concert, CEO Madeleine Careau underlined the retirement of oboist Theodore Baskin and his cellist wife Karen Baskin, who were with the OSM for 43 and 34 years respectively.
The concert, first given on Wednesday evening, will be repeated this Saturday afternoon, at 2:30 p.m.